The FeDibblety family » home improvement

Garden 2011

robfelty — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:28:05 +0000

Salsa ingredients from the garden - tomatoes and hot peppers

Now that 2011 is over and the garden has been long gone, I am finally getting around to showing it off. This year I did a few things differently than in past years. Instead of using black plastic, I used weed block, with mulch on top of it. This seemed to work quite well in keeping the garden from getting too warm. It also helped keep in the moisture, and did in fact block the weeds, except in the peripheral areas of the garden where I ran out of weed block. Maybe next year I will spend a few extra dollars to get a bit more.

Garden progress - putting mulch over the weed block

I also experimented with alternating rows of tall plants (tomatoes) and short ones – herbs, eggplant, peppers, etc. This seemed to work fairly well. The tomatoes did very well this year. I was particularly happy with the Black Krim, which produced a fair amount of incredibly tasty fruit. The pineapple tomato barely produced anything, which was disappointing. All of the cherry tomatoes did very good as in past years. The eggplant didn’t end up producing much. They had lots of flowers, but I only got about one piece of fruit per plant. I’m not sure what I did wrong there. And the giant pumpkin produced one giant pumpkin – 92 pounds. Speaking of squash, I also had a couple volunteer patty pan squash from the year before. In addition to all the tomatoes, I tried an armenian cucumber, which tasted very good – a little crunchier than a gerkin. We also tried a tomatillo plant, which thrived, but when they were finally ready to be harvested, we were too busy to figure out what to do with them. Oh well.Time to start planning the 2012 garden.

I made a little chart of the garden, displaying approximately what I planted where. Hover over the name to get a more thorough description.

Train table

robfelty — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 05:40:18 +0000

Spencer playing with the Spencer train

Spencer has recently gotten quite interested in trains. I had been thinking about getting him a train table for several months for Christmas, but hadn’t made up my mind. The last time we went to the railroad museum, he started talking about how Santa was going to bring him a train, so then I decided to get one. I did a bunch of research on train tables online, and most of them had very mixed reviews. Then I saw some instructions on how to build one, and decided to give it a try. I ended up mostly following the instructions in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0NhM8H0fus

Train table

The main change I made was that instead of making the table 24″x48″, I made it 38″x48″, to fit the tracks we bought. I’m glad that I waited to build the table until after we got the tracks, and that I tested them.

Train table top view

It ended up taking me most of the day on the 23rd to build it. The thing I am most proud of is that the only thing I bought was wood filler, and some 3d nails. All of the wood was just scrap sitting in my garage. Of course, since it was scrap, it wasn’t necessarily the nicest stuff. I had exterior grade plywood, which had quite a few knots, which required filling. So I ended up using a lot of wood filler. This was my first experience with using wood filler. There were many different brands to choose from. Most claimed to be stainable, but it didn’t seem like it took the stain very well. So the table doesn’t look that great, but it is sturdy. I think we will eventually paint it. Spencer doesn’t seem to care at all how it looks though. He likes it very much, and that is the important part.

For the legs, I used pine 1″x4″s. For the lip around the top I used 1″x3″ douglas fir, which I have been using to trim out the doors I have been slowly installing in the house. So that wasn’t really scrap, but I had already had them lying around.

One corner of the table

Lightning McQueen raking leaves

robfelty — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 04:58:44 +0000

Sunday afternoon after nap Spencer helped me rake leaves. We had a pretty good time. He is getting more helpful all the time. Here is a short video of him scooping leaves into the wheelbarrow. We dumped all the leaves onto the garden to compost. (We went to the zoo for trick or treating in the morning. He did not want to take off his awesome Lightning McQueen costume)

Pumpkins

robfelty — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 23:41:29 +0000

Meg and Rob by the giant pumpkin we grew

Clare recently bought a new onesie for Meg with some pumpkins on it, and the text “daddy’s little pumpkin”, which pleased me, since she has lots of “i love mommy” shirts, but not many shirts with “daddy” on them. Clare put that on Meg this morning, and I got the great idea of taking a picture of Meg with the giant pumpkin that we grew in the garden this year. Not only did Meg’s shirt match the pumpkin, but I thought it would also be a good indication of how big the pumpkin is. We probably could have gotten it bigger, but we didn’t try too hard. Clare had originally suggested that growing a pumpkin could be fun. When I went to buy plants, the only one I could find was a giant pumpkin, so I bought it. It got quite big very quickly. It probably would have gotten bigger had I watered it more and given it more fertilizer, but I wasn’t really interested in having a 1000 pound pumpkin. It is probably about 100 pounds. I didn’t weigh it.

Rob and Meg with the giant pumpkin

Salsa 2011

robfelty — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 18:53:08 +0000

13 pints of canned salsa

Yesterday we canned salsa. It has been three years since the the last time I canned salsa. This year, I had the help of Nick and Karen, which was much appreciated. Clare helped out by taking Spencer and Meg to the zoo with Alisa and Tao, so they were out of our hair. I want to mention that Clare is a supermom, for carrying Meg in the Baby Bjorn and Spencer on her shoulders around the zoo for two hours. I don’t think it would have gotten done without both of those key points.

Salsa ingredients from the garden - tomatoes and hot peppers

Salsa ready to be put in jars

I harvested about 40 tomatoes and about 10 hot peppers. Nick bought an additional 5 or 10 large tomatoes (5 pounds) from the Boulder farmer’s market. We put in 5 anaheim peppers and a couple banana peppers, with the seeds removed. We also put in two large green bell peppers, and three medium onions. We put in one bulb of minced garlic. Then we added some salt, cumin, and coriander. It now occurs to me that we forgot the vinegar! Whoops. We also added one large can of tomato paste to thicken it up a little bit. Even though we let the chopped tomatoes drain in a colander before putting them in, it was still a little bit runny.

Leftover tomato juice

We started preparing the salsa around 10:30, just after Clare left with the kids, and got the first batch into the canner around 1 p.m., just around the time that Clare got back from the zoo Then we took a lunch break, and got the second batch in around 3 I think. We processed the jars for 45 minutes (the closest recipe in the blue book said 35 minutes, plus 10 minutes more for our altitude).

Batch one (left) versus batch two (right)

Today I inspected the jars after waiting the necessary 12-24 hours for the jars to properly seal and cool. There is one thing I would do differently. We did two batches – 7 pints and then 6 pints. With the first batch, the salsa separated a little bit, with some kind of very runny, watery juice at the bottom of the jars. I think this is because we didn’t cook the salsa long enough. The second batch, which had a longer cooking time did not have this problem. I also filled a few of the jars a bit too full. One of the jars had a bit of salsa on the outside of the jar, but all of the jars seemed to seal. I pressed on all of the lids, and none of them indented. I then took the rings off and checked that each lid was on firmly.

Tomato-stained Nick

Karen amuses herself by smelling celery bitters